Page:Hine (1912) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/213

 difficult and deficits correspondingly greater. The dining car man on most, if not all, western roads is attached to a losing game. When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window. The dining car superintendent is kept busy retaining the affections of the management in the face of red figures.

A dining car is about the most complex proposition in its operation that we have on the railroad. It will be the hardest to bring under the supervision of the division superintendent and his assistants. The difficulties of so doing are many, but are not insurmountable. The dining car, because it moves on wheels, is an incident to the manufacture and sale of transportation. It is not, as a few dining car people suppose, merely a traveling hotel to which the railway is an incident. Originally the dining cars were under the passenger traffic department. Later it was realized that they are logically a part of operation. So they have been placed under the general manager and his subordinate, the superintendent of dining cars. We say nonchalantly that the superintendent and the train conductor can instruct the so-called conductor of the dining car. Let a passenger conductor report a dining car